Accenture teams with Catholic Health Initiatives on national population health project

Catholic Health Initiatives (CHI), one of the nation’s largest non-profit health providers and Accenture have teamed on a nine-month initiative that will apply analytics to identify at-risk factors among patient populations. Catholic Health Initiatives and Accenture will design and implement information management capabilities across healthcare facilities in 17 states. The effort is expected to help CHI target patient populations to improve care delivery and to better monitor patient health, while streamlining clinical operations for more efficient care management. Additionally, the initiative will focus on enhancing data warehouse capabilities and information management governance.

Accenture began working with CHI two years ago, according to Kelly Rakowski, managing director for Accenture’s health provider business who spoke with CivSource about the project.

“CHI had a need to improve population health management and wanted to move from a more traditional, hospital based system to an integrated, risk management system,” she says. “To help them do that we need a needs assessment of their patient populations market-by-market.”

This initiative is an extension of an enterprise-wide analytics strategy that Accenture and Catholic Health Initiatives have developed during the past 12 months. The effort will establish a solutions platform that can be applied to future quality measurement programs, including care management, clinical integration, managed care and value-based purchasing initiatives.

Essentially the project will bring a deeper level of analytical capability and data-driven decision making to managing CHI. Rakowski notes that one of the biggest requirements is focused on building out a dataset that will eventually help them use predictive analytics for planning, clinical, and business decisions.

“We are working with CHI to help them find ways to better target their care toward specific population needs like charity care, medicaid care, in order to understand the full cost and where opportunities for improvement are. Once they identify those opportunities they can start to create better business models,” Rakowski says.

“Part of the problem is the fragmentation of information – a lot of information is sitting in silos. With this project, we will help them pull that information together, improving usability and get a full picture of patient care.”

She expects that the 17 state project with CHI will not only provide information for Catholic Health’s own work, but can also give greater insight to state health officials about local patient populations. The work Accenture does here will also inform projects with other health care providers already in the pipeline, and in the future.

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